[BTR] [Fic] And nagging little thoughts change into things you can't turn off…
Trickster week. A verbose angel of knowledge and a suicidal ex-time-agent don't walk into a bar...
In the late afternoon Dmitri should have been walking to the Torchwood infirmary to see if the results of various bloodcounts had improved with treatment.
She shouldn't be seeing a green flash open up in the world around/just before her, sending her somewhere drastically else in the time it takes for her to yelp and try to stumble back - no no no no no she didn't just get out of one hellhole to end up in another time and place, and her mind keeps going back to April, years older, and to all the other people she reads about, the ones who never come back at all...
And then, in the space of time it takes for her to register pneumatic pounding and blue skies punctuated with plumes of steam, smoketacks and the tang of coal smoke to the air and at least she still has her messenger bag, the world flashes green around her again and drops her off in the Tower again.
But this isn't the hall she was walking down. This is one of the dormitory bedrooms, and if the man at the desk is any indication - the one who just spun around when he heard her, shutting his journal like it was incriminating, the one who recognizes her with a shock as palpable as her own, the one who shares a face but never a disposition with one Desmond D. Descant - this is the one place worse than being stuck in Chicago: the Isengard Remix.
For a second, even Dmitri's words fail her, and all she can say is "Shit!"
J raises his hands, but slowly, so as not to startle her. This, he should have seen coming, after Ianto, after Owen and Rachel and Luka, but this...
This is crossing lines even those didn't, and he can feel his heart rate try to spike as he's thrown into a contingency mode no one should be trusting him with. "It's-" he starts, and bites back an all right; "you can just-"
"I'm gonna go," Dmitri says, sliding over to the door without ever ceasing to face him, fist wrapping around the doorknob and-
And nothing. The knob won't budge.
Dmitri makes a muffled curse as J specifically scoots his chair away from her, trying to provide some measure of reassurance in a situation which can't be reassured away. She turns, trying the lock, trying the knob, finally kicking the door with a strangled noise, and J watches it all with an expression slowly but surely making its way aghast.
"It's not going to work," he says, trying to keep his voice nonthreatening - because yes, of course, this is a situation which won't come across threatening at all. Oh, hi, welcome to the room of the person who brutalized you over the course of a week or so, and by the way, there's no escape. "The Tower's decided to - it throws me in someone's way, and then just locks me into the sitch-" He pushes his chair back a bit further against his desk. "...if it makes you feel better, you could barricade me in the bathroom, or something."
Dmitri rounds on him. "And what?" The tone is vicious, because while Dmitri would prefer the flight aspect of this mode, that's obviously not happening and fight is the only other recourse. For Dmitri, seven times out of ten, fight is the more natural response anyway. "Rest assured in the idea that you wouldn't be able to force the door if you wanted to?"
...so that would be a 'no,' then, J fills in.
Dmitri takes a step back, planting her feet squarely on the ground, and J slumps into himself a bit more. He'll put across every impression of harmlessness, damn it, if it kills him to do so.
"I've still got one can of mace on me," she flat-out lies; she used up everything she was carrying on her way through Silent Hill, and she hasn't exactly stopped off home, if her lease hasn't defaulted yet, to grab her stuff, if it's even still there. But he doesn't need to know that. "And I don't remember that ending well for either one of us, so let's just not start that dance again."
"I won't move," J offers.
"And I still owe you one bout of kicking your scrotum into your eyeteeth, so you'd better not!" She delivers that with a finger straight at his chest, and then moves to the closest thing this room has to a spot diametrically opposite him. Okay. She can handle this. She's stuck in a room with the largest trigger her life has ever seen fit to hand her. She can handle this.
She's just walked out of a hell town which had a two months to do its damnedest to break her, and she can handle this.
She pulls up her hands, running them through her hair to keep it out of her face, out of her eyes. "Who am I stuck in a room with?"
J is watching her, head slightly down and turned to the side, clear submission in every line and motion. "It's J," he says. "Just J, now."
Not Thane. No one. No one you should have been thrown in with, but I'm no more dangerous than-
...that's a lie, isn't it? He's always more dangerous than. Some days he's just better at convincing himself and everyone around him.
Dmitri laughs like the noise is being hemmorhaged up from under her lungs. "Great. Okay. Fine."
She backs into the wall, watching him with eyes which convince themselves they'll never blink again. J exhales, rests his palms on his knees, regulates his breathing, and... doesn't stare back. Nonaggression. It's slightly easier to reach than threatlessness.
There's silence, shredded by breathing, for about three minutes before Dmitri realizes that she's going to go insane of nothing happening long before anyone makes a move, by these rules.
She swallows. Right. Handling this, that's what she was going to do, and if she could take a pickaxe to a biblical angel, she can deal with one mad bastard who cuffed her to a wall and-
"I sat through that entire damn trial," she blurts out. "Every last bit. I took notes. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any follow-up questions but I'd also be lying if I said I ever wanted to ask them, but whoop-de-loop-de-trou-de-loup, here I am, stuck in your bedroom, and all I can ask right here, right now, is if it'd even be fair to ask anything at all, because higher courts than Dmitri Lang have brought it back down the mountain that this is all that's called for in your case, stuck here in middle Chicago waiting for someone to rehabilitate the twisty little Grue-infested bottomless pits of your brain with a lamp and a rope ladder, like it's just that easy and all the people who less colossal long and storied resumes of shit what went down in their cognitive sphere than you do are happy, healthy, productive members of society I'd trust my bus pass to, let alone my health and safety. I'm just saying - I just mean... there was a point there, but I'm not sure I got to it." She takes another deep breath.
And then hangs.
Her hands are fists, pressing into the wall where her still-healing newly-cleaned-and-bandaged wingstubs are pressed between her back and the drywall, and she's staring at him with all the force of never let the bastards win, while he's looked up and is staring at her as if she's holding Mt. Saint Helens upside-down over his head.
She has no idea what she was trying to say.
He's just... watching her.
And she stares back, oddly unfazed by that direct eye contact, the way her own gaze locks onto it, orienting by it amidst the rushing of her ears. He still hasn't moved, which is probably a blessing. She'd be reacing for the nearest sharp object, were that the case.
But he still hasn't moved, and as long as he's over there and not moving, she can bring perception into play against the panic that keeps trying to take her, and she can watch that expression on his face, and the way he won't just fucking move and break the tension.
"...I knew Jack Harkness where I was from," she says after a moment, when it's clear he's not going to say anything. Her voice has dropped, much quieter now, because now that the torrent of words has stopped, it's going back to getting difficult to control. "He was this kinda cowboy guy with a sense of the dramatic and a damn fast draw, stubborn as three donkeys perched on top of a windmill, all smoke and mirrors and hidden doors for all that he was as subtle as a blinking neon sign. Always willing to take a girl out for shots and soundbytes." She swallows. "And then there's you. What is it about this universe that gets people so fucked in the head?"
J looked away sometime during those descriptors, his eyes locking on the cover of his journal. He doesn't need to hear about the people he used to be. "It's not this universe."
"Who the hell is responsible for you, anyway?"
And there, his head snaps back up again. He can't parse that question, not in context - responsible for what? Fucking him up?
"I mean I've never been a fan of our prison system," Dmitri says, as though it's all part of the same thought, even when J can't follow. "Just like I've never been a fan of our options for radioactive waste disposal. You get something dangerous and if you can't decontaminate it, your options are what? Stick it in a box somewhere and hope no one healthy ever gets in, hope no contaminant ever gets out? Maybe it makes a twisted sort of sense to talk about halflives of human populations, all those people stuck on life sentences, though halflives deal with isolated samples and we keep pouring more in. You, though? No halflife. None."
"I-" J begins.
"Speaking of radioactive personalities, I talked to Sark a few long months ago," Dmitri says, running right over any noise J could have been making. "All broken up over something or other, contemplating his life and whatever he - whatever thing wasn't my business when it came to April. And you know, there are these theories floated around every now and then about nuclear reactors, things that'd take radioactive waste and process it, spit out waste that's maybe a few rungs down on how much of your shit it'll fuck up if you don't have lead shielding on hand, and I gave him all the advice I had on how to be a normal boy again, like this is a goal it's at all reasonable to set in his case. Maybe he'll get lucky and transmute a few of his minor actinides. But that's what I can do, girl from the smartest natural class on my home Earth in my home universe, but I've still been trying, because Trafalgar off the coast of Spain, I've had a year without wings, now, but I am still coming out of this better than you. It's what I do, buckaroo, I keep my own little eye on the people you screwed over, whether I need an NBC suit to do it or not, but you-"
She pauses for breath, and J doesn't even try to get a word in edgewise.
"Who the hell is keeping their eye on you?"
It's getting to be the most natural thing in the world again - biofeedback, emotional control, and that scares J even as much as he needs it to stay steady in the face of that onslaught. And what's she even saying? That he needs to be rehabilitated, that he needs to be put away, that she's glad he's down as far as he is, that she's worried, that someone needs to protect them from him, that someone needs to caretake him? That he can't be rehabilitated, just like Sark can't ever be? That he can be, but only to a point? All of the above? None?
...is she looking for an answer?
Eventually, he manages to swallow the thick residue that's been collecting in his throat. "Torchwood is," he says. "A guardian angel is." No one is, and that's why I can do certain things for you. That's why I can ask the TARDIS for help severing myself from the morphogenic field, and that's why I can put a bullet in my brain.
Dmitri snorts. "Yeah, and the inmates are running the asylum," she says. "I'd let it go, but when you go crazy, it takes three months and half of the city with it. And I like this city." Her fists drum against the wall. "It's where I keep my stuff."
She tilts her head, jaw tight. It's been creeping back into her awareness that she's backed up against a wall with her torturer sitting on the other side of the room, and for all the noise she's filled the intervening space with, the air hasn't become any more non-traversable.
And my friends, she thinks, but she's not about to say.
"Who do you think?" J asks, looking at the wall somewhere about a foot away from her left hip. He glances up again, though his head is still down. Down-dog. "I'm not here to cause trouble." And that's just about the most he can offer.
"Trouble doesn't need a cause, in Chicago," Dmitri says.
So far: maybe ten minutes in the room and no one's against the wall bleeding. Well. No more than they put themselves or were when they fell in. She relaxes, but only a fraction, and it feels too far in any case.
"You did a hell of a lot of damage," Dmitri says.
J's voice is almost silent. "I know."
"I was at the fucking trial!" Dmitri says again, voice rising again. "You know when you had - when you were-" And there her throat closes down, because while she can wring out the words under other circumstances, My wings wwere cut off, she will not say them here, not to him, and maybe it doesn't matter that he should know all the context anyway - how the Doctor was there, every cut and saw-scrape knife against bone, pushing her down inside her mind, how that was almost worse - oh, not as lasting, not the thing she sees every time she showers, but in that moment at that time...
Tact, in many ways, is something which happens to other people, around Dmitri. Even so, she's not going to pillory the Doctor to make a point she doesn't know why she's making.
"Back home," she says, "I got my wings in and no one was surprised. Angel of Knowledge. For me, that was like a big shiny gold medal. Everything I wanted. Every fucking thing, and the friends, and the going out on weekend nights, and the killer-good cocktails, all of that, all of that, I could survive without it so long as you left me my brain and listening to psychics and resident Neqs go on, cool as Dee pleases, on just how fucked-up everything..."
She shakes her head.
"You," she says, and recounting this realization tempers not at all the way she's still hanging to the wall. "You're not Idi Amin, you're Malcolm X from his pre-Hajj days, raised to about the power of nine thousand, and like I told Sark it may not be something I want to get within fifty long yards of but I get it, okay? Because what the hell are we if we take minds out of the equation? A great gaping logic error in the fabric of whatever."
...after all of that, she starts breathing again.
J just watches, jaw tight, hands now equally as tight on his knees. He's not entirely sure that she's done until no one says anything for a minute or so, and even then...
"Why are you telling me this?" he asks. That might unleash another flood on him, and he's not sure how he's managed to surface long enough for breath thus far, but... he's got nothing else to ask.
Dmitri, though, just looks at him. "Because I get it," she says, again. "...and because I'm stuck in a room with you, and because sometimes catharsis is better than three degrees toward the equator on a cold winter day. I don't know. What the fuck makes you think I'm being rational about any of this?"
J lets out a very uneasy chuckle.
He stares at her for a bit longer.
...he exhales.
Dmitri sets her jaw, all fire and firm defiance. "What?"
"I was just thinking you should try the door again," J says.
Dmitri's eyes narrow, then flick doorward.
"The last time, the Tower kinda let me out after..." Well, after a fencing match a lot less spectacular than that one.
Dmitri mutters something under her breath, and edges over to the door. She looks down only enough to take the knob in her hand... and it turns easily.
"Setesh in a sweatervest." She pushes it open, edging out into the hall. "I'm making a note of this."
"Sorry to-" For a moment, J can't see his way through the absurdity to come up with a proper goodbye. "Sorry."
Dmitri casts him a disparaging look.
"Just don't drink the water," she says, slips into the hall, and slams the door behind her.
J watches the door. He glances across to where the green rift opened up, and then he screws his eyes shut and focuses on breathing. The onslaught is still ringing in his ears, and he feels... kinda like he did after the delta wave, too much information and too little he can do to cope with or understand it, only dialled down in a matter of degree.
...he was writing something.
Right.
He turns back to the desk, and forces his hand to steady as he picks up the pen. Radioactive containment, high courts and authorities who still leave things to do...
Well. He should get on that, shouldn't he?
In the late afternoon Dmitri should have been walking to the Torchwood infirmary to see if the results of various bloodcounts had improved with treatment.
She shouldn't be seeing a green flash open up in the world around/just before her, sending her somewhere drastically else in the time it takes for her to yelp and try to stumble back - no no no no no she didn't just get out of one hellhole to end up in another time and place, and her mind keeps going back to April, years older, and to all the other people she reads about, the ones who never come back at all...
And then, in the space of time it takes for her to register pneumatic pounding and blue skies punctuated with plumes of steam, smoketacks and the tang of coal smoke to the air and at least she still has her messenger bag, the world flashes green around her again and drops her off in the Tower again.
But this isn't the hall she was walking down. This is one of the dormitory bedrooms, and if the man at the desk is any indication - the one who just spun around when he heard her, shutting his journal like it was incriminating, the one who recognizes her with a shock as palpable as her own, the one who shares a face but never a disposition with one Desmond D. Descant - this is the one place worse than being stuck in Chicago: the Isengard Remix.
For a second, even Dmitri's words fail her, and all she can say is "Shit!"
J raises his hands, but slowly, so as not to startle her. This, he should have seen coming, after Ianto, after Owen and Rachel and Luka, but this...
This is crossing lines even those didn't, and he can feel his heart rate try to spike as he's thrown into a contingency mode no one should be trusting him with. "It's-" he starts, and bites back an all right; "you can just-"
"I'm gonna go," Dmitri says, sliding over to the door without ever ceasing to face him, fist wrapping around the doorknob and-
And nothing. The knob won't budge.
Dmitri makes a muffled curse as J specifically scoots his chair away from her, trying to provide some measure of reassurance in a situation which can't be reassured away. She turns, trying the lock, trying the knob, finally kicking the door with a strangled noise, and J watches it all with an expression slowly but surely making its way aghast.
"It's not going to work," he says, trying to keep his voice nonthreatening - because yes, of course, this is a situation which won't come across threatening at all. Oh, hi, welcome to the room of the person who brutalized you over the course of a week or so, and by the way, there's no escape. "The Tower's decided to - it throws me in someone's way, and then just locks me into the sitch-" He pushes his chair back a bit further against his desk. "...if it makes you feel better, you could barricade me in the bathroom, or something."
Dmitri rounds on him. "And what?" The tone is vicious, because while Dmitri would prefer the flight aspect of this mode, that's obviously not happening and fight is the only other recourse. For Dmitri, seven times out of ten, fight is the more natural response anyway. "Rest assured in the idea that you wouldn't be able to force the door if you wanted to?"
...so that would be a 'no,' then, J fills in.
Dmitri takes a step back, planting her feet squarely on the ground, and J slumps into himself a bit more. He'll put across every impression of harmlessness, damn it, if it kills him to do so.
"I've still got one can of mace on me," she flat-out lies; she used up everything she was carrying on her way through Silent Hill, and she hasn't exactly stopped off home, if her lease hasn't defaulted yet, to grab her stuff, if it's even still there. But he doesn't need to know that. "And I don't remember that ending well for either one of us, so let's just not start that dance again."
"I won't move," J offers.
"And I still owe you one bout of kicking your scrotum into your eyeteeth, so you'd better not!" She delivers that with a finger straight at his chest, and then moves to the closest thing this room has to a spot diametrically opposite him. Okay. She can handle this. She's stuck in a room with the largest trigger her life has ever seen fit to hand her. She can handle this.
She's just walked out of a hell town which had a two months to do its damnedest to break her, and she can handle this.
She pulls up her hands, running them through her hair to keep it out of her face, out of her eyes. "Who am I stuck in a room with?"
J is watching her, head slightly down and turned to the side, clear submission in every line and motion. "It's J," he says. "Just J, now."
Not Thane. No one. No one you should have been thrown in with, but I'm no more dangerous than-
...that's a lie, isn't it? He's always more dangerous than. Some days he's just better at convincing himself and everyone around him.
Dmitri laughs like the noise is being hemmorhaged up from under her lungs. "Great. Okay. Fine."
She backs into the wall, watching him with eyes which convince themselves they'll never blink again. J exhales, rests his palms on his knees, regulates his breathing, and... doesn't stare back. Nonaggression. It's slightly easier to reach than threatlessness.
There's silence, shredded by breathing, for about three minutes before Dmitri realizes that she's going to go insane of nothing happening long before anyone makes a move, by these rules.
She swallows. Right. Handling this, that's what she was going to do, and if she could take a pickaxe to a biblical angel, she can deal with one mad bastard who cuffed her to a wall and-
"I sat through that entire damn trial," she blurts out. "Every last bit. I took notes. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any follow-up questions but I'd also be lying if I said I ever wanted to ask them, but whoop-de-loop-de-trou-de-loup, here I am, stuck in your bedroom, and all I can ask right here, right now, is if it'd even be fair to ask anything at all, because higher courts than Dmitri Lang have brought it back down the mountain that this is all that's called for in your case, stuck here in middle Chicago waiting for someone to rehabilitate the twisty little Grue-infested bottomless pits of your brain with a lamp and a rope ladder, like it's just that easy and all the people who less colossal long and storied resumes of shit what went down in their cognitive sphere than you do are happy, healthy, productive members of society I'd trust my bus pass to, let alone my health and safety. I'm just saying - I just mean... there was a point there, but I'm not sure I got to it." She takes another deep breath.
And then hangs.
Her hands are fists, pressing into the wall where her still-healing newly-cleaned-and-bandaged wingstubs are pressed between her back and the drywall, and she's staring at him with all the force of never let the bastards win, while he's looked up and is staring at her as if she's holding Mt. Saint Helens upside-down over his head.
She has no idea what she was trying to say.
He's just... watching her.
And she stares back, oddly unfazed by that direct eye contact, the way her own gaze locks onto it, orienting by it amidst the rushing of her ears. He still hasn't moved, which is probably a blessing. She'd be reacing for the nearest sharp object, were that the case.
But he still hasn't moved, and as long as he's over there and not moving, she can bring perception into play against the panic that keeps trying to take her, and she can watch that expression on his face, and the way he won't just fucking move and break the tension.
"...I knew Jack Harkness where I was from," she says after a moment, when it's clear he's not going to say anything. Her voice has dropped, much quieter now, because now that the torrent of words has stopped, it's going back to getting difficult to control. "He was this kinda cowboy guy with a sense of the dramatic and a damn fast draw, stubborn as three donkeys perched on top of a windmill, all smoke and mirrors and hidden doors for all that he was as subtle as a blinking neon sign. Always willing to take a girl out for shots and soundbytes." She swallows. "And then there's you. What is it about this universe that gets people so fucked in the head?"
J looked away sometime during those descriptors, his eyes locking on the cover of his journal. He doesn't need to hear about the people he used to be. "It's not this universe."
"Who the hell is responsible for you, anyway?"
And there, his head snaps back up again. He can't parse that question, not in context - responsible for what? Fucking him up?
"I mean I've never been a fan of our prison system," Dmitri says, as though it's all part of the same thought, even when J can't follow. "Just like I've never been a fan of our options for radioactive waste disposal. You get something dangerous and if you can't decontaminate it, your options are what? Stick it in a box somewhere and hope no one healthy ever gets in, hope no contaminant ever gets out? Maybe it makes a twisted sort of sense to talk about halflives of human populations, all those people stuck on life sentences, though halflives deal with isolated samples and we keep pouring more in. You, though? No halflife. None."
"I-" J begins.
"Speaking of radioactive personalities, I talked to Sark a few long months ago," Dmitri says, running right over any noise J could have been making. "All broken up over something or other, contemplating his life and whatever he - whatever thing wasn't my business when it came to April. And you know, there are these theories floated around every now and then about nuclear reactors, things that'd take radioactive waste and process it, spit out waste that's maybe a few rungs down on how much of your shit it'll fuck up if you don't have lead shielding on hand, and I gave him all the advice I had on how to be a normal boy again, like this is a goal it's at all reasonable to set in his case. Maybe he'll get lucky and transmute a few of his minor actinides. But that's what I can do, girl from the smartest natural class on my home Earth in my home universe, but I've still been trying, because Trafalgar off the coast of Spain, I've had a year without wings, now, but I am still coming out of this better than you. It's what I do, buckaroo, I keep my own little eye on the people you screwed over, whether I need an NBC suit to do it or not, but you-"
She pauses for breath, and J doesn't even try to get a word in edgewise.
"Who the hell is keeping their eye on you?"
It's getting to be the most natural thing in the world again - biofeedback, emotional control, and that scares J even as much as he needs it to stay steady in the face of that onslaught. And what's she even saying? That he needs to be rehabilitated, that he needs to be put away, that she's glad he's down as far as he is, that she's worried, that someone needs to protect them from him, that someone needs to caretake him? That he can't be rehabilitated, just like Sark can't ever be? That he can be, but only to a point? All of the above? None?
...is she looking for an answer?
Eventually, he manages to swallow the thick residue that's been collecting in his throat. "Torchwood is," he says. "A guardian angel is." No one is, and that's why I can do certain things for you. That's why I can ask the TARDIS for help severing myself from the morphogenic field, and that's why I can put a bullet in my brain.
Dmitri snorts. "Yeah, and the inmates are running the asylum," she says. "I'd let it go, but when you go crazy, it takes three months and half of the city with it. And I like this city." Her fists drum against the wall. "It's where I keep my stuff."
She tilts her head, jaw tight. It's been creeping back into her awareness that she's backed up against a wall with her torturer sitting on the other side of the room, and for all the noise she's filled the intervening space with, the air hasn't become any more non-traversable.
And my friends, she thinks, but she's not about to say.
"Who do you think?" J asks, looking at the wall somewhere about a foot away from her left hip. He glances up again, though his head is still down. Down-dog. "I'm not here to cause trouble." And that's just about the most he can offer.
"Trouble doesn't need a cause, in Chicago," Dmitri says.
So far: maybe ten minutes in the room and no one's against the wall bleeding. Well. No more than they put themselves or were when they fell in. She relaxes, but only a fraction, and it feels too far in any case.
"You did a hell of a lot of damage," Dmitri says.
J's voice is almost silent. "I know."
"I was at the fucking trial!" Dmitri says again, voice rising again. "You know when you had - when you were-" And there her throat closes down, because while she can wring out the words under other circumstances, My wings wwere cut off, she will not say them here, not to him, and maybe it doesn't matter that he should know all the context anyway - how the Doctor was there, every cut and saw-scrape knife against bone, pushing her down inside her mind, how that was almost worse - oh, not as lasting, not the thing she sees every time she showers, but in that moment at that time...
Tact, in many ways, is something which happens to other people, around Dmitri. Even so, she's not going to pillory the Doctor to make a point she doesn't know why she's making.
"Back home," she says, "I got my wings in and no one was surprised. Angel of Knowledge. For me, that was like a big shiny gold medal. Everything I wanted. Every fucking thing, and the friends, and the going out on weekend nights, and the killer-good cocktails, all of that, all of that, I could survive without it so long as you left me my brain and listening to psychics and resident Neqs go on, cool as Dee pleases, on just how fucked-up everything..."
She shakes her head.
"You," she says, and recounting this realization tempers not at all the way she's still hanging to the wall. "You're not Idi Amin, you're Malcolm X from his pre-Hajj days, raised to about the power of nine thousand, and like I told Sark it may not be something I want to get within fifty long yards of but I get it, okay? Because what the hell are we if we take minds out of the equation? A great gaping logic error in the fabric of whatever."
...after all of that, she starts breathing again.
J just watches, jaw tight, hands now equally as tight on his knees. He's not entirely sure that she's done until no one says anything for a minute or so, and even then...
"Why are you telling me this?" he asks. That might unleash another flood on him, and he's not sure how he's managed to surface long enough for breath thus far, but... he's got nothing else to ask.
Dmitri, though, just looks at him. "Because I get it," she says, again. "...and because I'm stuck in a room with you, and because sometimes catharsis is better than three degrees toward the equator on a cold winter day. I don't know. What the fuck makes you think I'm being rational about any of this?"
J lets out a very uneasy chuckle.
He stares at her for a bit longer.
...he exhales.
Dmitri sets her jaw, all fire and firm defiance. "What?"
"I was just thinking you should try the door again," J says.
Dmitri's eyes narrow, then flick doorward.
"The last time, the Tower kinda let me out after..." Well, after a fencing match a lot less spectacular than that one.
Dmitri mutters something under her breath, and edges over to the door. She looks down only enough to take the knob in her hand... and it turns easily.
"Setesh in a sweatervest." She pushes it open, edging out into the hall. "I'm making a note of this."
"Sorry to-" For a moment, J can't see his way through the absurdity to come up with a proper goodbye. "Sorry."
Dmitri casts him a disparaging look.
"Just don't drink the water," she says, slips into the hall, and slams the door behind her.
J watches the door. He glances across to where the green rift opened up, and then he screws his eyes shut and focuses on breathing. The onslaught is still ringing in his ears, and he feels... kinda like he did after the delta wave, too much information and too little he can do to cope with or understand it, only dialled down in a matter of degree.
...he was writing something.
Right.
He turns back to the desk, and forces his hand to steady as he picks up the pen. Radioactive containment, high courts and authorities who still leave things to do...
Well. He should get on that, shouldn't he?